SaturdayNightSpecials

@wandrecanada: I just haven't seen that level of humor in any of Double Fine or Telltale's games (admittedly I didn't play Tales of MI because nothing about it intrigued me). Costume Quest was quite funny, but that wasn't Schafer's game.

And I love Ron Gilbert-era Monkey Island too, but the less said about DeathSpank, the better.

Jonathan Ackley was a project lead and writer on Curse, but has no other credits since. Maybe he left video games or died or something?

"I wonder if anyone has ever done 100 jumps?"

Bite me.

Greatest point-and-click ever made.

Also, by fucking far, the funniest game ever made.

It even has a great soundtrack and great art. The ship battle mini-game should be the obligatory bad part, but it's actually kinda fun.

What wormhole did all these brilliant people fall into after making Curse?

Chakushin Ari (aka One Missed Call), 2003

Maybe watching it immediately after the generic and corny Teketeke (2009) made me too lenient on this movie, but I would call Chakushin Ari a pleasantly competent J-horror. Obviously it owes a lot to movies like Ringu, but the mere act of copying a great movie doesn't ever bother me. What matters is (a) studying and understanding what you copied rather than aping it, and (b) supplementing borrowed ideas with some of your own creativity.

Chakushin Ari does a nice solid job of (a) for the most part - it hits the beats you expect, and it hits them with feeling, if not with any great skill. For one thing, it's not patient in getting to the scary stuff, and in a movie that's maybe 30 minutes too long, this starts to put a real damper on the scary stuff. But the creepy parts themselves are quite good (especially the TV show scene), and the movie does manage some creativity in spots; when some crucial backstory started to emerge about 2/3rds in, I was intrigued by those themes and hoped to see them evolve.

Well, they kinda don't. From then on, the movie busies itself with a new spooky location, a couple "so-what?" plot twists, and eventually

Anyway. Like I said, pleasantly competent. The things it does best were done much better by Ringu and a few other movies, but if you're like me, J-horror in this vein is satisfying as long as it's, shall we say, "workmanlike." Chakushin Ari is workmanlike for long enough to get away with its eventual failures, and end up as a fun, if not particularly creepy, movie.

3/5

I put it in the trash the first time, and that's the smart thing to do.

Like Biggie said: why blow up my spot cuz we both got hot?

I do have stretches, say 1-2 weeks, where I dream super vividly every night. I've also been on tons of different anti-depressants but I've never noticed a correlation between these stretches and starting/stopping meds or changing doses. Hardly scientific though.

I assume it's an indicator of getting more REM sleep, which sounds like a good thing. Lots of people say melatonin gives them wild dreams, so there's an OTC option for you.

Rogue One: I see what people were saying about it being a "war movie" - it certainly brought the action down to earth, so to speak, to a degree that no previous Star Wars movie did. It was an excellent direction to take, and I would love to see it bleed over into Episodes 8 and 9.

That said, it was clearly hard for them to commit to that direction, judging by the slices of overly-choreographed comic-book action that still pop up throughout. For example: when the blind dude beats up a gang of stormtroopers in Jedha, it's a cool scene, and makes sense for the character - but it's seriously undermined by the fact that we just saw Jyn beat up a smaller gang of stormtroopers a few minutes earlier. Maybe Jyn is also a master of martial arts, but (a) that was never really established and (b) it doesn't matter, because each time you show us a badass melee beatdown, you inevitably make us less impressed by the next badass melee beatdown, even if they're increasing in scale or tempo (or you substitute a disabled character). The same goes for firefights, and the big battle near the end of the film suffers for that very reason. I would have loved to see some tense, small-scale action early on, a bit closer to The Hurt Locker than to Call of Duty.

Still, the tone was different enough to be a fun change of pace. The casting was also a breath of fresh air. It took me a while to realize that Diego Luna was actually the male lead, because in most big-budget films he would have been lucky to get a sidekick role behind Chris Pine or something. The one weak link was Mads Mikkelsen, who was fine except in one of his most crucial scenes, the strangely tepid and unconvincing hologram message to Jyn. Speaking of which, can there be a moratorium on "dying character holds on just long enough to say goodbye" scenes? Or at least a limit of one per movie?

I give it 4/5, upgraded from a solid 3/5 because of the very satisfying ending (minus the totally unnecessary and awkward Leia cameo.)

I'm just so relieved that the default version of the main character is a generically handsome, lily-white American dude. Really showing off the power of their next-gen character creator.

It's funny you say that, since I decided not to watch either of those movies because both seemed firmly in the psychological (ie, non-supernatural) horror camp and I have no interest in that. In fact, I bet the main reason many of these types of movies are classified as horror rather than thrillers (a perfectly descriptive but underused term) is for marketing purposes. They can't get teens to see it unless it looks spooky.

I became disenchanted with it a few years ago when I started having it 4-5 times a week. Sonic's steak & egg burrito is my jam now.